Robert Preville has been in the equipment marketplace space for decades. Early in his career, he helped start an online marketplace for manufacturing services that was eventually bought and expanded by a team led by Jeff Bezos.
When this resulted in an exit opportunity, Preville moved to North Carolina and started a company called Global Test Supply, which began renting equipment. Preville came to recognize that many customers had short-term needs for expensive specialty equipment, and it was this insight that led to the creation of KWIPPED—a B2B marketplace for just those specialty equipment rentals—in Wilmington, in 2014.
As KWIPPED grew, Preville and his team noticed that many industries confused rentals with leasing (the former being short-term, the latter effectively amounting to financing with intent to gain ownership). So, they devised a solution: Suppliers would quote a sale price rather than a rental rate, and KWIPPED would convert it into a teaser monthly payment. Applications flowed into a lender marketplace, where lenders underwrote, approved, and purchased the equipment, with the buyer paying back over time.
“And what we did, which we didn’t quite realize we were doing, is we were effectuating embedded finance,” Preville explained.
This concept of embedded finance—essentially offering financing at the point of sale—proved to be a major breakthrough. Equipment sellers on KWIPPED showed strong interest in integrating the system directly into their sales processes, enabling customers to seamlessly apply for financing. Recognizing the broader opportunity, the team went all in, shifting their focus to what is now APPROVE.
Quick approvals
At its core, APPROVE integrates seamlessly into equipment sellers’ websites, enabling buyers to view financing options alongside standard pricing.
Preville pointed to Espresso Parts, a distributor of commercial coffee equipment, as an example. A buyer can view an espresso machine priced at $6,200 and immediately see a financing option for as low as $147 per month.
“Historically, Espresso Parts would have a guy at a lender”, Preville said, “On finance, they’d say, ‘Well, let me introduce you to my guy.’ The guy would take the application manually, and then it would manually go to underwriting. And it could be several days, a week, or more before the process goes through.”
The disjointed and drawn-out process has historically led companies to simply take the equipment on credit or purchase order. With APPROVE, however, the same concept of financing becomes seamless in execution. When the buyer clicks the “Approve” button, the platform initiates a streamlined application workflow. The system pulls soft credit data and third-party information, then algorithmically packages and matches the application with the lender most likely to approve it.
Specifically, APPROVE’s lender-matching intelligence uses machine learning to analyze past lender behavior, approval trends, and credit profiles across different asset types and vendors. By studying each lender’s unique underwriting and risk patterns, the platform predicts approval likelihood and financing cost, continuously learning from outcomes to optimize matches.
Even when lenders’ stated specialties differ from observed trends, APPROVE identifies hidden patterns, routing each application to the lender most likely to approve it efficiently.
APPROVE works with a range of partner lenders across multiple categories and acts as a broker, earning a broker fee on each financed deal. This model helps businesses access competitive financing options while the startup generates revenue from successful matches.
Spreading the lending roots
Applications for APPROVE’s technology also extend beyond financing approval. For instance, Leica Geosystems—which produces technologies for geographical measurements—integrated APPROVE into its sales of surveying and 3D-imaging equipment. In doing so, the company attracted new customers and turned e-commerce from a support function into a lead-generation engine.
The platform also gives sellers a comprehensive view of potential buyers, enhancing market intelligence and sales strategy even where financing is not part of the equation.
QUICK BITS
Startup: APPROVE
Founder: Robert Preville
Founded: 2015
Team size: 40
Location: Wilmington
Website: approvepayments.com
Funding: $5M raised
Looking forward, the APPROVE team aims to expand into broader commercial lending. They’ve found that if a business is exploring financing options for equipment, it is often an indication of near-term expansion for that business.
APPROVE has also recently begun to apply its lending partnerships into areas like working capital, SBA loans, and real estate.
“The idea there is that we can use the equipment finance transaction to then intelligently start serving other commercial lending products that from a timing standpoint, makes sense to that borrower,” Preville said. “And we can sort of become a comprehensive resource for commercial lending, but do so by going to market through equipment finance.”
Earlier this year, Preville was recognized by Monitor, a leading information platform in the equipment financing space, as one the “Most Influential People in Equipment Finance.”
